Pioneering technology and a will to push back boundaries is creating new hope for data centre management thanks to the enterprising vision of ALLIED CONTROL LTD – a worldwide leader of 2-phase immersion cooling technology, says its CEO KAR-WING LAU.

Data processing and management is growing in importance as artificial intelligence makes inroads across all sectors. So Allied Control Ltd’s founding in April 2012 was timely – its mission, to build the most energy-efficient data center in Hong Kong.

Most data centers worldwide already require in average about 30% to 40% of their entire electricity consumption for data center cooling. But since Hong Kong has a very challenging sub-tropical climate, the electricity consumption for data center cooling is especially high. “Hence, we were founding a company to not only create a data center, but also to pioneer a revolutionary 2-phase liquid immersion cooling technology. In 2015 we have been acquired by our parent company, the Bitfury Group,” says its CEO, Kar-Wing Lau.

“Allied Contol Ltd is today, the worldwide leader of 2-phase immersion cooling technology, allowing extreme densities in data centers to save a lot of space, paired with world-class leading energy efficiency.

“Today’s data center space, with cloud and hyper-scale operators specifically, are highly competitive. That’s the key reason why such companies are very interested in our best-in-class technology to gain a significant competitive edge if they can lower capital and operational expenditures,” Lau says.

Power of Innovation   

“We live and breathe continuous improvement, always striving to achieve the very best results. Of course it helps that we’re applying methodologies like Lean Six Sigma, etc., but that we have innovation as core value, is most critical. This has helped us to achieve the worldwide leading position we are in today, and to further strengthening our leading position in future.

While traditional air cooling tops out at around 30kW per rack, more sophisticated water cooling ends at around 50-60kW, our special 2-phase immersion cooling technology allows systems substantially beyond 250kW.”

“Companies are very keen on our best-in-class technology to gain a significant competitive edge by lowering capital and operational expense.” – Kar-Wing Lau

Bucking the Trend 

“We are well aware that not all computing applications can fill out the extreme densities and cooling capacities provided by our systems. However, we definitely see a strong trend of the market moving towards us with the advent of very dense and energy-intensive applications like artificial intelligence (AI), using very hot running GPUs and other chips. Supercomputers used to be the domain of government organizations, but today many corporations are interested in big data mining and machine learning to gain a competitive edge. But also government regulations are increasingly scrutinizing data center electricity waste, like for example a US presidential executive order on all government data centers, and also an order on data centers around Beijing to restrict electricity use of data centers.

View to a Skill      

“The greater China market is very well aware that IT and data centers are vital industries for the future. There is a strong push in the greater China area to become a worldwide leader in artificial intelligence, which requires substantial investment. Government restrictions on energy efficiency create additional pressure on how to balance performance with environmental sustainability priorities.”

He adds: “We are in discussion with the largest Internet companies in the greater China area, who are all very interested in our technology. While we are expanding, we also have some exciting developments in our product roadmap, which make integration of our technology much easier in future. One for example is a stand-alone shipping container type of data center with unparalleled density, allowing to put a mobile super computer onto any concrete foundation.” These and other path-finding ideas are in process and soon Allied Contol Ltd will roll out new services that will make life easier, faster and more profitable for all.

For additional information, please visit www.allied-control.com

Hong Kong’s Business Leaders share market and interest intelligence in the pages of HKMVC 2019

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